ient
times, so that his volumes have become an elaborate historical
guide-book for the student or tourist.

But while he thus delighted in whatever bore upon history as he
conceived it, his conception was one which belonged to the eighteenth
century rather than to our own time. It was to him not only primarily
but almost exclusively a record of political events--that is to say,
of events in the sphere of war, diplomacy, and government. He
expressed this view with concise vigour in the well-known dictum,
"History is past politics, and politics is present history"; and
though his friends remonstrated with him against this view as far too
narrow, excluding from the sphere of history many of its deepest
sources of interest, he would never give way. That historians should
care as much (or more) for the religious or philosophical opinions of
an age, or for its ethical and social phenomena, or for the study of
its economic conditions, as for forms of government or battles and
sieges, seemed to him strange. He did not argue against the friends
who differed from him, for he was ready to believe that there must be
something true and valuable in the views of a man whom he respected;
but he could not be induced to devote his own labours to the
elucidation of these matters. He would say to Green, "You may bring in
all that social and religious kind of thing, Johnny, but I can't." So
when he went to deliver lectures in the United States, he delighted in
making new acquaintances there, and was interested in the Federal
system and in all institutions which he could trace to their English
originals, but did not care to see anything or hear anything about the
economic development or social life of the country.

The same predominant liking for the political element in history made
him indifferent to many kinds of literature. It may indeed be said
that literature, simply as literature, did not attract him. In his
later years, at any rate, he seldom read a book except for the sake of
the political or historical information it contained. Among the
writers whom he most disliked were Plato, Carlyle, and Ruskin, in no
one of whom could he see any merit. Plato, he said, was the only
author he had ever thrown to the other end of the room. Neither,
although very fond of the Greek and Roman classics generally, did he
seem to enjoy any of the Greek poets except Homer and Pindar and, to
some extent, Aristophanes. His liking for Pindar used to surpr